Fundis make a big deal about their "creator" god, some even
claiming that the 6 days of Genesis creation is literal truth.
What bunk. Here is clear evidence that bible writers were
practicing an early form of religious "my god can whip your
god". Each days "creations" are shown to be just a claims of
"my god really created" what was attributed to preexisting day
of the week gods. To all the fundis that are so found of
"proving" things with probabilities, see the end section where
the author gives the odds of this corespondence of being a mere
coincidence. Enjoy.
JAMES KIEFER <[email protected]>
Genesis 1-11 as theodicy; Three views of Genesis 1

Way Two: The Creation Hymn As Directed Against Babylonian Polytheism

Next I propose to consider a second way of understanding the
hymn, a more complicated way, and in order to introduce it, I must
first say something about the Mesopotamian mythology as accepted,
with variations, by the successive cultures that occupied the
Tigris-Euphrates basin before the Persian conquest. The seven
planets were identified with seven gods. You understand that these
are planets in terms of the belief that the earth stands still in
the middle of the system and everything in the sky revolves around
it. Besides the stars, which always keep the same position relative
to each other, and besides occasional appearances like meteors and
comets, the sky has seven objects visible to the naked eye which
appear to move against the background of the fixed stars, and these
were known to the ancients as the seven planets. In order of what
was supposed to be their distance from the earth, these are the
Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The belief
in the seven planets circling the earth in that order survived from
the time of ancient Mesopotamian civilization well into the
seventeenth century (it was taught at Harvard, side by side with the
newer Copernican view), and has greatly influenced Western
literature and thought. But here we are concerned only with the fact
that the Mesopotamians associated the planets with seven of their
gods, and also with the seven days of the week. The Romans,
although a seven-day week was not part of their normal calendar,
borrowed the scheme for astrological purposes, and from them it
spread throughout Europe, as shown in the naming of days.

In the attached table, if you compare the English names in the first
column with the name of the planets (which are also mostly names of
Roman gods) in the fourth column, you can see the connection quite
nicely with Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but with the other four
days there has been an attempt to replace each Roman god by the most
similar Teutonic god, which obscures the pattern. In the second and
third columns, you see the French and Spanish names for the days of
the week, and you can perhaps see the resemblance to the names of
the planets, at least for the middle five days. (Sunday and Saturday
have come to be known as the Lord's Day and the Sabbath
respectively, and so the resemblance is not there.) The order of
assigning the days is not arbitrary. If you start with the second
day and list every second day for a fortnight, you will obtain the
list: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. This is the
order of the planets from the earth outward in the Ptolomaic system.
This association of the planets with the days of the week was
part of the common culture for Chaucer in the fourteenth century, as
is shown by this fragment from the Knight's Tale:

Just like a Friday morning, truth to tell,
Shining one moment and then raining fast.
So changey Venus loves to overcast
The hearts of all her folk; she, like her day,
Friday, is changeable, and so are they.
Seldom is Friday like the rest of the week.

So then, we have a planetary deity associated with each of the
days of the week. And if we consider what the ancients believed
about each of these deities, we shall find evidence that the author
of the Creation Hymn had these deities in mind when he wrote, and
that he was setting out to claim, on behalf of the one God, the
glory that the pagans offered to the various planets.

The first day is sacred to Shamesh, the sun. Clearly the sun
god will be thought of as the giver of light. But the Hebrew writer
says, "No, it is not Shamesh who gives light. It is the Lord who is
the Creator and Giver of light. Praised be His Name!"

The second day is sacred to Shin, the moon. The association of
the moon with air and water is less obvious than that of the sun
with light, but is nonetheless found in many cultures. The moon, the
closest of the planets, is often thought to be in the upper reaches
of the atmosphere, and to affect the weather. A ring around the moon
means a storm coming. Also, of course, the moon causes the tides,
the constantly shifting boundary between the realm of water and the
realm of air. But the Hebrew writer says, "No, it is not Shin who
controls the tides. It is the Lord who says to the waters: thus far
you shall come and no farther. It is not Shin whom you must ask for
good weather. It is the Lord who sends rain or drought, cool breezes
or sirocco, as He wills. Praised be His Name!"

The third day is sacred to Nergal, or Mars. Nergal eventually
becomes a god of war, but he does not start out as one. Originally
he is a forest god, a god of vegetation, a personified tree. His
name means "he who comes up out of the earth." A parallel
development is found in Roman mythology, where Mars, who ends up as
a war god, started out as a forest god. And so we find that on the
third day, the Lord made the earth bring forth trees and green
herbs. It is not Nergal, says our writer, whom we have to thank for
earth and vegetation. They are the gifts of the Lord. "Thou visitest
the earth and blessest it. Thou makest it very plenteous. The hills
rejoice on every side, and the valleys stand so thick with corn that
they shall laugh and sing." This is the Lord's doing. Praised be His
Name!

The fourth day is sacred to Nabu, or Mercury. Nabu is the god
of scribes, of writing and record-keeping. He is the inventor of the
calendar. And so we find that on the fourth day, God set the sun and
moon in the sky and said, "Let them mark the set times--the days and
the years." You will note that they are called simply the greater
and the lesser light, rather than the sun and the moon. The Hebrew
word for the sun is "shamesh", which is also the name of the
Mesopotamian sun god, whom the writer is pointedly ignoring. And
indeed, throughout the entire Bible, the writers do not refer to any
day of the week, except the Sabbath, by name. It is always simply
the N'th day of the week. (Those of you who are familiar with
Teutonic mythology may be wondering, "Why do we call this day
Wednesday? How did Wotan come to be identified with Mercury, rather
than with Jupiter?" The reason is that Wotan invented runes,
invented writing and record keeping and the calendar. This
identifies him with Nabu, who did likewise, the connection being
made through Mercury, who is the patron of merchants, and so of
records and so on.) It is not Nabu, our writer assures us, who made
the calendar. It is the Lord who ordains the seasons, the set times,
the days and the years. A thousand years in His sight are like
yesterday when it is passed, or like a watch in the night. "Thou,
Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth, and
the heavens are the work of Thy fingers. They will perish, but Thou
remainest. They will all grow old like a garment, like a mantle Thou
wilt roll them up, and they shall be changed, but Thou art from
everlasting, and Thy years shall not fail." In His hand are the
living and the dead, the past, the present, the future, and all
eternity. Praised be His Name!

The fifth day is sacred to Marduk, or Jupiter, and since he is
the ruler of the gods it is a bit difficult to pick out just one
thing as his chief characteristic. But birds are created on the
fifth day, and I believe that the eagle was sacred to Marduk, as it
certainly was to Jupiter. And if we had to say just one thing about
Marduk, it would surely be that he achieved his position as ruler of
the gods by fighting and killing the great sea monster, the dragon
Tiamat, or Leviathan. And according to Genesis, it is on the fifth
day that God created the great whales, the great sea monsters.
Notice that God as here portrayed is on a level far above that of
Marduk. The sea monsters are not His enemies, His rivals for power,
something that He must struggle against. They are no threat to Him
at all. He zapped them into existence with a word, and He can zap
them out again any time He pleases (see Psalm 104:24-26; Psalm
74:12-17; Isaiah 27:1). He is not a god, one power among many. He is
God, the Creator, and all things are subject to Him. Praised be His
Name!

The sixth day is the day of Ishtar, or Venus, the goddess of
love and fertility and reproduction. On this day God made the land
animals, including man. A biologist may object that sex is not
confined to the land animals, but is shared by the birds and fishes,
and even the trees and green herbs of the third day. But to most
people, then as now, the sexuality of plants and fish, perhaps even
of birds, is not as blatant as that of mammals, and Ishtar tended to
be associated mostly with flesh, as opposed to fish and fowl. But
Ishtar is an illusion, a mockery. It is the Lord Who sets the
solitary in families, and makes the barren woman to be a joyful
mother of children. It is He Who has blessed both men and beasts,
commanding them to be fruitful and multiply. It is the Lord Who
made all cretures, great and small. "When I consider Thy heavens,
the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast
established; what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son
of man that Thou dost care for him? ... Thou hast given him
dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under
his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the
birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes
along the paths of the sea. O Lord our God, how excellent is Thy
Name in all the earth!"

The final day is that of Ninurta, or Saturn, and it is hard to
say much about him directly, because the Mesopotamians did not write
very much about him. He is mentioned occasionally in connection with
agriculture, and with wells, brooks, springs, and fountains, and
with the underworld, the cold dark realm under the earth where the
springs and fountains originate. He seems to be in some sense a
sinister figure, possibly in origin a god of death. His day, the
seventh day, is unlucky, and the nineteenth day of the month is
doubly unlucky. (It is counted as the forty-ninth day of the
previous month, and the seven times seven means especially bad
luck.) On the nineteenth, no contracts were signed, no business was
transacted, no one went out of his house unnecessarily, no one began
any undertaking of any sort. The day was cursed. And the seventh day
of the week was likewise unlucky, although less so. If the Hebrews
got their Sabbath observance from the Mesopotamians, it is truly
remarkable what they did with it. It remained a day on which people
did not do anything. But it was no longer an unlucky day, a cursed
day. Rather, it was a day that God had blessed, a day for rejoicing,
for taking one's ease and contemplating the accomplishments of the
previous week, as God contemplated His Creation on the Sabbath.
After the Exodus, we find the Jews speaking of the Sabbath not only
as a commemoration of God's rest after the creation, but also as a
commemoration of their deliverance from slavery in Egypt.

I spoke of the Sabbath as the day on which God contemplated his
work of the previous six days. But perhaps that misses the point.
Although God is known to us primarily as the Creator of the world,
it is not to be supposed that all of creation, all of space and
time, FILLS the Divine Mind. That would be the error of the very
young child, who supposes that his mother lives only to care for him
and to make him happy, and cannot conceive of her as a person in her
own right, who has many other interests as well. In the account of
the Sabbath, we are reminded that the six days, which show God
creating the world and acting upon it, are not all there is to God,
that He can get along perfectly well without the world, that it is
not in the least necessary to Him, and that He is God-in-Himself as
well as God-as-Creator.

Comparing The Days In Genesis And In Mesopotamian Thought

The Second Interpretation of the Creation Hymn as just outlined
is based on lining up, side by side, in two parallel columns as it
were, the events assigned to the seven days of the week in Genesis
and the characters of the planetary deities associated with those
same days in Mesopotamian mythology. Given the correspondence, how
are we to explain it?

One possible answer is that the correspondence has been read
into the data rather than found in them -- that the characters of
the days and the characters of the gods are both sufficiently
plastic so that it is not surprising that they can be pressed into
some kind of fit. One of my students says:

> If Jupiter-Marduk were associated with Friday rather than
> Thursday, you would argue that this is appropriate, because
> Marduk is the king of the gods, and it is on Friday, according
> to Genesis, that Man, the pinnacle and crown of creation, is
> created. If Nergal and Ninurta were reversed, you would have
> no difficulty in arguing that Ninurta, the god of wells, is a
> patron of agriculture and appropriate for the Third Day, while
> Nergal, the god of war, is therefore the god of death (and, by
> extension, of sleep and inaction) and appropriate for a day on
> which one avoids action. You have the moon associated with the
> tides, and this is plausible. But you could just as easily
> have associated the moon with Day Three and vegetation,
> pointing out the custom of planting crops according to the
> phases of the moon. You could have associated the moon with Day
> Four and the calendar, particularly in the Mesopotamian culture
> where the lunar month was standard. You could have associated
> the moon with Day Six and reproduction, pointing out that the
> menstrual cycle coincides with the lunar month.

I am not convinced. Associating the sun with light, for example, is
hardly an arbitrary matching. I invite the reader to take the seven
days of Genesis, and the seven planetary gods, as described by me or
as described by any reference work of his choosing, and attempt to
construct the best, the most appropriate, matching up of gods with
days. (I am asking, not for a pairing that can be defended, but for
one that the reader honestly feels is at least as natural, as
appropriate, as the one I have offered.) If his pairing has, say, N
gods associated with the same days of the week as my pairing, then
the following table will show him the probability that the list of
days and the list of gods would dovetail so well by chance.

(It is the classic envelope-stuffing problem. If a secretary has
seven letters and seven envelopes, and stuffs the letters into the
envelopes without looking, what is the probability p(N) that at
least N of the seven letters will be correctly sent? How large does
N have to be before we conclude that the secretary must have
peeked?)

Actually, putting it in these terms is misleading, since the
relevant questions are not of the form: "Given that one item on the
Genesis list is Light and that one item on the Babylon list is the
Sun, what is the probability that these would end up by chance in
the same slot (out of seven possible slots)?" Obviously the answer
to that is: "One seventh!" But the question is rather: "Given that
the one list contains the sun, what is the probability that the
other list would contain (in any of its seven slots, never mind the
same slot) something so appropriate as light. Unfortunately the
answer to the second question cannot be so neatly calculated. But I
should be disposed to doubt the sincerity of anyone who claimed that
he judged this probability to be as high as one-seventh. And
similarly for the other days.